Time kills critics, my dear.

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There is a mystery and then they solve it.

Sometimes there is no call or even a way to be clever about something. Snap a language and technical stuff won’t do much good here. Because this movie, this movie, is a fucking movie. In the special features, Sidney Lumet explains that he took on the film because he was looking to do a souffle. Light and never collapses. And it doesn’t. Except for Albert Finney’s Hercule Poirot, who gets more manic throughout as he visibly falls in love with solving the case, this is movie made up of only small parts played to their fullest by one of those all-star casts that is such a 70’s movie thing. The only modern equivalents for those today are the Ocean’s movies and the Nolan Bat-films. You can’t quite say it’s a tongue in cheek movie, no one is winking to the camera or anything, but it’s just so…entertaining. Which is the goal it set out for and reached and presented itself as effortless in doing so. A pat on the back for 1974.